Jeffrey SMART, Australia/Italy b.1921 d.2013, The traveller, 1973, synthetic polymer paint and oil on canvas, 100.5 x 116cm. Purchased 1975 with the assistance of an Australian Government Grant through the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council.
JMW TURNER, England b.1775 d.1851, (The Temple of the Sibyl, Tivoli) c.1794-97, grey and brown watercolour washes over pencil on laid paper, 39.3 x 26.6cm. Purchased 1977.
Takahashi HIROAKI, Japan b.1871 d.1945, Trading vessels at anchor, Inatori Harbour, Izu Province, c.1930, colour woodblock print on paper, 26.2 x 38.8cm; 24.2 x 36.4cm (comp.). Purchased 1997 with funds from the International Exhibitions Program.
Gwyn HANSSEN PIGOTT, Australia b.1935 d.2013, Travellers no. 3, 2001, Limoges porcelain, wheelthrown, 26 parts: 31 x 200 x 17cm (installed). Purchased 2001, Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant.
Craig KOOMEETA, Australia b.1977, Apelech brothers, 2002, carved milkwood with natural pigments, left figure: 112 x 35 x 15cm; right figure: 124 x 38 x 11cm. Purchased 2002, Queensland Art Gallery Foundation.
Danie MELLOR, Australia b.1971, Whether you like it or not, 2005, pencil on Magnani paper, 71 x 101cm. Purchased 2005.
In a time of global unrest and mass migration, Travellers looks, with a philosophical eye, at the way humans have moved around the world. In the 17th and 18th centuries, ‘the grand tour’ was seen to complete the education of privileged young gentlemen while, in recent years, travel has been made more accessible than ever before.
While travel may offer change and new experiences and opportunities for discovery for Australian travellers, the forced migration of the hundreds of thousands of people in Europe is also acknowledged in a selection that includes artists as diverse as JMW Turner and Craig Koomeeta.
McKay says, “I wanted to balance the idea of being empowered and wandering the world, to contrast this perception with forced migration, and those who are vilified for it. These travel experiences might reshape a sense of identity, and give a stronger insight into who we are. Together they raise questions of independence and limitation; the mutability of identity; and the potent experience of encounter and the element of chance in existence.”
Paintings by Jeffrey Smart, Jan Senbergs, Elwyn Lynn and Dadang Christanto, sculpture by Koomeeta and Gwyn Hansson Pigott, and film by Liam O’Brien, are further extended by netsuke, Japanese watercolours by Takahashi Hiroaki and the Chinese burial jar earthenware tradition. Travel may be within the home, between this world and the next, forced or recreational, traumatic or pleasurable. These concepts and more are explored in an exhibition that is diverse and stimulating.
Travellers
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
1 July – 29 October
Every two years, the Ramsay Art Prize opens to Australian artists under 40 working in any medium. Presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia and supported in perpetuity by the James & Diana Ramsay foundation, the prize seeks to spotlight contemporary artists at a formative moment in their careers.
Marru translates to “becoming visible” in Danie Mellor’s ancestral Dyirbal language (of Far North Queensland). In his current exhibition Danie Mellor: marru | the unseen visible at Queensland Art Gallery, the title reflects the work’s gentle ruminations on the complexities of the history of colonisation entwined with personal memories.
Five Acts of Love, a new exhibition at ACCA, maps the space in which memory, intimacy and resistance intersect.
Mungari, a landmark exhibition at Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum, marks the return of the Gweagal spears to their ancestral country while speaking to the constellation of relationships that knit together people, objects and place.
With a current survey exhibition at Rockhampton Museum of Art chronicling 23 years of painting and photography, Julie Fragar talks about creative influences and what it’s like to observe a Supreme Court murder trial.
Community is the foundation of Claire Conroy’s exhibition at Lismore Regional Gallery. As a new arrival to the area, her art practice ties her to fellow artists, while her medium, camera obscura, allows for a deepening of social connections with her sitters as they commit to the shoot.
